Jungle cancels £250K worth of sales

Fears it can't deliver for Xmas

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Jungle.com is cancelling 2,500 orders because it believes it can't fulfil them before Christmas.

The average order value at Jungle is £100 which means the company is turning away £250,000 worth of revenue.

The company said it made the decision because it wanted its customers to have time to buy their goods elsewhere. "It's a fair decision not to keep them waiting any longer," said marketing director Andy Singleton. "We're making the assumption that most of them are Christmas presents."

Jungle has been nursing an order backlog headache for more than two months, after installing the final parts of a £5 million Retek information management system. This led to the data in a number of customer orders becoming scrambled.

The final parts of the £5 million Retek system went live on 24 September. Elements had run for weeks, but when the last components went live, it soon became clear that orders failed to get through from the computer system to the warehouse. Some orders never made the journey at all; at other times bursts of orders appeared. The company had expected things to be cleared up in early November.

The reasons for cancelling the 2,500 orders fall in a number of categories: the customers order data is incorrect; the products they wanted are out of stock; manufacturers no longer make what the customer wanted; it will take longer than the Christmas cut off date to source and supply the order.

Jungle's customers were emailed today about the situation. The small number that hasn't ordered online will receive a letter tomorrow explaining their order is cancelled.

Singleton stressed that customers should have no fears about ordering their Christmas presents from Jungle. He said the system was now working well and that the last order date for Christmas delivery for goods in stock is 20 December. ®